How did king leonidas die

Leonidas full name
How old was leonidas when he became king
King leonidas quotes

•

The real life exploits of Leonidas of Sparta and his 300 warriors at Thermoplyae have given rise to the myth of the Spartan superhero – the supremely disciplined man of few words who had a body of steel, could endure any hardship and would fight to his last breath. Such men really did exist and chief among them was Leonidas, the Spartan king who defied the might of Persia, saving Greece from annihilation. In this week’s Biographics we discover the real life Leonidas.

Early Years

Leonidas I was born around 540 BCE in the Greek city of Sparta. At that time Greece was made up of hundreds of city states, of which Athens and Sparta were the largest. Leonidas’ father, Anaxandrides, was the king of Sparta.

For the Greeks, warfare was the supreme statement of a citizen. It is what made a man and gave him the right to be a part of his city. Every Greek, in every city state was obliged to military service from the age of twenty until the age of forty-five. In order to prepare for that life, boys were put into a military training camp, known as the Agoge, from the age of seven.

There w

•

Leonidas, the king of Sparta

Leonidas (540-480 BC), the legendary king of Sparta, and the Battle of Thermopylae is one of the most brilliant events of the ancient Greek history, a great act of courage and self-sacrifice. This man and the battle itself has inspired since then many artists, poets and film-makers that hymn the spirit of him and his Spartans.

Little is known about the life of Leonidas before the Battle of Thermopylae. Historians believe that he was born around 540 BC and the he was son of King Anaxandrias II of Sparta, a descendant of Hercules, according to the myth. Leonidas was married to Gorgo and had a son. He must have succeeded his half-brother to the throne at around 488 BC, till his death in 480 BC. His name meant either the son of a lion or like a lion.

In summer of 480 BC, Xerxes, the king of Persia, was attacking Greece with a big and well-equiped army. As he had already conquered northern Greece and he was coming to the south, the Greeks decided to unite and confront him in Thermopylae, a narrow passage in central Greece. Leonidas and his army, 30

•

Training as a Hoplite

Leonidas was the son of the Spartan king Anaxandrides (died c. 520 B.C.). He became king when his older half-brother Cleomenes I (also a son of Anaxandrides) died under violent, and slightly mysterious, circumstances in 490 B.C. without having produced a male heir.

Did you know? The Thermopylae pass was also the site of two other ancient battles. In 279 B.C., Gallic forces broke through Greek forces there by using the same alternate route that the Persians did in 480 B.C. In 191 B.C., the Roman army defeated an invasion of Greece by the Syrian king Antiochus III at Thermopylae.

As king, Leonidas was a military leader as well as a political one. Like all male Spartan citizens, Leonidas had been trained mentally and physically since childhood in preparation to become a hoplite warrior. Hoplites were armed with a round shield, spear and iron short sword. In battle, they used a formation called a phalanx, in which rows of hoplites stood directly next to each other so that their shields overlapped with one another. During a frontal attack, this wall of shi